be quiet! Dark Rock 3 CPU Cooler

With the Dark Rock 3 now out of the box, we can take a tour around it and see what this design has to offer. From the front, there is not much else to see at the moment other than the 135mm SilentWings fan attached to it with its 4-pin plug at the bottom of this image.

Removing the fan exposed the leading edge design of the stack of fifty fins. We can see that the sides are higher than the fins in the center, and each fin has a saw toothed design on the edge.

The top of the cooler offers a stepped, black brushed aluminum cap that covers the top fin as well as offering black caps for all of the heat pipe tips. This, along with the name applied to the center, gives this cooler a sleek and stylish view as you would see it in a chassis.

Looking at the Dark Rock 3 from the right side, we see this design uses an open fin design with small tabs bent to keep the fin spacing correct. We also see that the fan is attached with wire fan clips that mount to grooves in the sides of these fins.

The back of the cooler is a fair bit unusual in its design. Offsetting the fins in groups of three does not do all that much for the airflow coming from the front fan, but, if adding a second fan, this allows room for that fan to get to full pressure and airflow.

The left side of the Dark Rock 3 is the same as what we saw on the right, as we expected it to be.

In this image, we can see the dimples applied to the fins to help disturb the air flow as it passes through the cooler's fins, but we can also see that there are six heat pipes that are packed tightly together at the base and spreading out evenly and in two lines as they run through all of the fins.

It isn't all that often that we see single tower cooler designs with such a large pre-cooler. In this example, be quiet! has incorporated this fifty tab pre-cooler to help rid this cooler of a fair bit of heat before it is taken up into the fins for removal.

As for the base, just like with the rest of the cooler body, after it has been milled to accept the hardware, and the base is milled to this near mirror finish, it all received dark nickel plating. The base is very level across most of the mating surface, but the corners are slightly rounded.

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